The Last Waltz
I have this note in my Notes app on my phone that I've been maintaining for the last few months. I called it "Things to consume". It's my running list of movies or shows I want to watch, podcasts to listen to, books to read. This weekend I plucked an item off my list. It was the Mr. Scorsese docuseries on Apple TV.
My interest in Scorsese began during my deep dive into SF music history throughout this year. I had watched the movie on Woodstock that he was a part of with other NYU grads. Though it really solidified when I watched The Last Waltz, a documentary on The Band's last performance ever at Winterland Ballroom in SF. I was reading Bill Graham Presents: My Life Inside Rock And Out & heard how it was made from Bill Graham's perspective.
After watching the Mr. Scorsese docuseries, I was like wow I am so fascinated with Martin Scorsese & admire the legacy he's created. It made me laugh though because there are three main influences that I've admired this year… & they are all older men, two who are still alive & one who's passed. Not your typical archetype from a 28 year old female.
This summer, I started this sort of running North Star document where I've analyzed the well-known influences in my life over the years, including these three people. I think people you admire or look up to can reveal different things about yourself & there's a reason you're drawn to them, so I wanted to start mapping that out for myself.
Doing this, I realized there's an intersection between the three new people that have really resonated with me. Those three people being: Bill Graham, Rick Rubin, & now Martin Scorsese. They all have a connection to The Band & the movie The Last Waltz.
But the real through line between them all is that they've had the ability to take an idea & create space for that idea to come to life in its truest form. They all had such respect for art & its craft & made it their life's mission to protect & share it.
Bill Graham knew how to bring together so many different pieces to create a live concert experience that made everyone in the room feel something. He revolutionized the concert & festival experience. He had a relentless nature to him & was a perfectionist (almost to a fault).
The evening of The Last Waltz, he wanted to make sure the evening wasn't about the movie being made but about the experience of the people in the crowd. What you don't see in the film: Graham made sure all 5,000 people were fed a full Thanksgiving dinner, the ballroom filled with white-tablecloth tables, before the performance even began. They had 220 turkeys. To ensure that the entire thing felt elegant, Bill wanted it to be a premium dining experience that then seamlessly went into a night of rock 'n' roll. To the point where they hired professional dancers to get people out of the crowd to start waltzing so they could then bus the tables & clear them out.
Martin Scorsese was filming New York, New York at the time but he had to be a part of The Last Waltz. He came to SF on his weekend off from the film & did it all for free. Before the concert, he had storyboarded every camera angle he wanted to get in accordance with the lyrics of every song. He understood this was a once in a lifetime experience to be able to reflect the magic of that night on film.
These two shared two major traits that are: 1. Their meticulous attention to detail, 2. Their relentless drive that fueled them to bring their visions to life (mixed with a little stubbornness). To imagine what it was like to be behind the scenes in Winterland Ballroom that Thanksgiving with all of this creative genius coming together to create what they did BUT with competing priorities. Scorsese's number one being the film, Graham's number one being the audience's experience. The overlap of film, music, live performance, egos. It must have been magic & chaos all at the same time.
Where Graham & Scorsese knew how to get the most out of the artist for a performance with their own fiery passion, Rick Rubin actually brings the complete opposite. Rubin is quiet, calm, meditative when it comes to his approach. He listens so deeply & likes it to feel like he almost isn’t there in order to allow an artist to connect with themselves in the rawest form. He built Shangri-La, his famous recording studio in Malibu, which was featured in The Last Waltz. Prior to Rubin owning it, The Band had lived there so the scenes of them being interviewed in the film are shot there.
Rick Rubin has created this space where artists are meant to feel the specific energy that it harnesses & feel at home while they're recording there. They even repaint the entire studio before new artists come in so it resets the energy for that person.
It's all been because they have incorporated their full selves into what they're working on. Only through their lens of the world could these things have happened the way they have.
In doing so, they gave the artists around them permission to do the same, which facilitated authentic experiences & creation… whether that be in Rubin's recording studio, in one of Graham's venues, or on a set of Scorsese's.
